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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. This is David Kinch, chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. David and his farmer, Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, apply a biodynamic preparation to the crops. Photo of Cynthia Sandberg (right) and David Kinch (left) stirring rain water captured in buckets to make the biodynamic preparation. Cynthia's dog, Indy, is on the right.
Event on 4/27/07 in Ben Lomond. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. This is David Kinch, chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. David and his farmer, Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, apply a biodynamic preparation to the crops. Photo of Vegetables from the Garden, Potato Dumplings and Burrata Cheese, Vegetable Juices.
Event on 4/27/07 in Ben Lomond. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. This is David Kinch, chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. David and his farmer, Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, apply a biodynamic preparation to the crops. Photo of a soup called, "Veloute of Garden Greens and Creme Fraiche, smoked potato with mustard."
Event on 4/27/07 in Ben Lomond. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. Photo of Ubuntu restaurant owner, Sandy Lawrence (left) and gardener, Jeff Dawson (right), working in the restaurant's garden.
Event on 5/9/07 in Napa. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. This is David Kinch, chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. David and his farmer, Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, apply a biodynamic preparation to the crops. Photo of David Kinch grinding up bits of the White Quartz rock in a tube to make the biodynamic preparation.
Event on 4/27/07 in Ben Lomond. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Story on chefs who have their own biodynamic farms to supply their restaurant. This is David Kinch, chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. David and his farmer, Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, apply a biodynamic preparation to the crops. Photo of the White Quartz rock they grind up to make the biodynamic preparation. It's being chiseled apart in this photo.
Event on 4/27/07 in Ben Lomond. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Story on chefs who have their own...

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Strawberry and Cherry Tomato Salad with Maple.
By JOHN LEE/SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

Photo: JOHN LEE

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Strawberry and Cherry Tomato...

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Pea Pesto on Grilled Fish.
By JOHN LEE/SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE

David Kinch is known to drive at almost 90 miles per hour. When asked why, Kinch says, with a shrug, "I have to get somewhere."

Yet when this has-to-get-somewhere chef and owner of the four-star Manresa in Los Gatos arrives at Love Apple Farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he slows to an almost unrecognizable pace. Shortly after 7 one morning this spring, as two Australian shepherds dance around his heels, he ambles up to the back porch of the farmhouse. Wordlessly, he sits down on a bench next to farm owner Cynthia Sandberg, grabs a worn garden stake and vigorously stirs a nearby bucket of rainwater.

At this time of year, Sandberg provides nearly all the vegetables that appear on the restaurant's summer menu. On this May morning, the chef and farmer are making Preparation 501, one of nine formulas used in biodynamic farming. Ground quartz, or silica, is whipped into water for exactly one hour. The solution is then sprayed over the crops.

Biodynamically grown vegetables are the cornerstone of Kinch's cuisine because they are superior to organic, he says. Like chefs nationally who are strengthening the ties to the source of their food, he wants the farm nearby, and he wants to be hands-on.

Sandberg tells him she got going without him because, "you're supposed to start at dawn." Kinch protests he only got to bed at 2 a.m. the night before.

Yet, thanks to Kinch's relentless drive, Manresa garnered four stars from The Chronicle, and also received two stars from the 2006 Michelin Guide, and a spot on Restaurant Magazine's 2005 World's 50 Best Restaurants list. In Europe, where the quest for ultra-fine vegetables in haute cuisine is a full-blown movement, Kinch is recognized as a leader.

Earlier this month he was a featured presenter at "Vive las Verduras," a produce-focused gastronomy/science/architectural conference in Spain, where chefs Alain Passard (restaurant L'Arpège in Paris) and Ferran Adrià (El Bulli, Spain) were the marquee names.

Two months ago, Passard cooked three dinners at Manresa, using the vegetables from Love Apple Farm. Passard, who gets his produce exclusively from a farm outside of Paris, said Kinch's garden shows "a genuine craft, and a search for the definition of flavors."

Responding to that inner drive to "get somewhere," although perhaps not at 90 mph, Kinch started searching for a farm that would supply him with vegetables grown biodynamically about two years ago.

Biodynamic farming is the brainchild of the late Austrian philosopher/naturalist Rudolf Steiner, who came up with the method in the 1920s as farming was turning to chemicals, depleting the soil as well as the plant. Steiner felt that as a result, human nutrition was suffering. His philosophy is called anthroposophy; longtime adherents of biodynamics also study anthroposophy.

At the heart of Steiner's biodynamics are nine preparations. Most, like the springtime silica solution, involve highly diluted mixtures applied to compost, to the crop or to the land itself at specific times of the year.

"It's the next level," Kinch says. While he gratefully acknowledges Alice Waters' legacy, the farm-restaurant connection and the organic revolution, it's nonetheless time to go deeper. "You go to the farmers' market and all the chefs are there. We're buying the same organic leeks and lettuces. We're all doing the same thing. I wanted to do better."

He looked at various properties as he contemplated acquiring his own farm. Then he tasted some tomatoes grown organically by Sandberg, and asked her if she would start growing other vegetables and to supply Manresa exclusively. On the day that he and Sandberg sat down to negotiate a contract, the talks went smoothly. Then, Kinch said he hesitated. He had hoped for something else besides exclusivity and organics. Simultaneously, she piped up that she had a condition, too. That something edged on the "voodoo side," he said, but he wanted to try biodynamics. As it happened, she did, too.

Kinch is not the only American chef to look toward biodynamics and to create a more intimate, exclusive relationship with a farm. On the East Coast, chef Daniel Barber has Blue Hills restaurant on the site of Stone Barns farm in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., focusing on the farm-raised produce. A Rockefeller Foundation -funded living museum is also part of the complex.

Other Northern California chefs are following close behind. Preston Dishman, the new chef of the General's Daughter in Sonoma, has similarly tapped Andrea Davis, a graduate with a degree in sustainable agriculture, to grow the restaurant's vegetables, in part at nearby Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen.

Benziger has been biodynamic since 1997 and is certified by Demeter, an independent certifying organization. By adding a food production garden to the biodynamic grape growing, Benziger can increase the diversity of its acreage -- including pasture land, insectory, woodland and wetlands -- and complete the balanced system integral to biodynamic farming.

The restaurant Ubuntu, slated to open this summer in Napa, will be directly supplied by a biodynamic garden at Lion's Run Winery. Restaurant and winery owner Sandy Lawrence has dedicated acreage at her winery to biodynamic vegetable production for the restaurant.

"My aim is to live by not having a large footprint on the landscape," she says. Like others who had been growing crops organically, she was seeking "the most sustainable way to farm and produce food." To do so, she hired Jeff Dawson, uber gardener to Wine Country.

Dawson headed the Fetzer Valley Oaks gardens in Hopland (Mendocino County) in the '90s, then worked for Kendall Jackson, helping persuade the vintner to go organic. At the same time, he was schooling himself in biodynamics. By the early 2000s, when Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts was created, he had the tools and techniques to build a biodynamic garden.

He took a piece of land razed by construction, and through use of biodynamic preparations, converted it into "a garden that people were amazed by, not only in its beauty but by the quality of produce. Chefs tasted the produce, hand to mouth, and couldn't believe the flavors and intensity of what they tasted," he said.

Dawson sounds remarkably like Kinch. "It's another level of quality," Dawson says. "The biodynamic process connects the plant to the earth and to the cosmos." Steiner's various preparations are part and parcel of "an incredibly balanced system that takes the whole of nature into consideration. We sensitize the plant and soil to those forces."

Although Kinch couches biodynamics in "voodoo" terms, he insists on participating in all of the preparations, such as filling cow's horns with cow manure and burying them, then retrieving them six months later, making a watery preparation with the aged manure and flicking that solution over the crops with a paintbrush.

On the day that he sprayed the silica solution with purchased biodynamically prepared silica, he and Sandberg followed it by making their own biodynamic silica: Grinding quartz by hand into silica, pouring it into cows horns, and burying it in readiness for the following year. Love Apple Farm is gradually making its own preparations from scratch as it converts to biodynamic.

Dawson currently consults at several biodynamic gardens, including those at Round Pond Estate in Rutherford, which grows Cabernet Sauvignon and Nebbiolo grapes, olives for oil and garden produce. At the height of summer, Dawson says, the overflow produce is sold to Thomas Keller, who uses it at the French Laundry, Bouchon and Ad Hoc.

Besides the biodynamic philosophy and techniques, the movement's chefs and growers are aiming for near-complete independence, creating what Kinch calls "a closed loop," consisting of the garden, his menu and his signature cuisine.

Dishman, from Florida, wanted a supply of fresh produce from three sites to provide him with as much as 90 percent of the restaurant's produce.

Dawson says that in three years' time, Lion's Run, just a 12-minute drive from the 120-seat Ubuntu, will be able to provide 80 percent of the restaurant's produce in summer, and 50 percent in winter. Kinch says that he models his garden after Passard's, whose garden is just a few hours north of Paris. The beautifully crafted vegetables capture an inimitable quality of soil, sun and spirit of place.

Almost two years into the partnership with Sandberg, 80 to 90 percent of Manresa's vegetable menu is sourced from her garden. "We've written it into our business plan," Kinch says.

The savings in his produce bill is already apparent (about 60 percent), he says. As at L'Arpège, Passard's restaurant in Paris, Kinch often serves produce that is so freshly picked it hasn't yet been refrigerated. The flavors, he says, are incomparable.

Manresa's staff must continually adapt to the garden's harvest. On the day he worked on Preparation 501 at the farm, he stayed to harvest spinach, radishes, fennel, carrots and purple potatoes, among other produce. A plethora of chard, kale and other leaves becomes a veloute, a vividly emerald saturated creamed soup that is served over tea-smoked purple potatoes from the garden.

"It's not like opening a box of inanimate stuff," he says. "You're being thrown a curve ball every day. You've got once chance to cook it right.

"Boiling them and frying them in hot fat -- we don't do that," he says, referring to the traditional techniques of parboiling and sauteing. Such treatments destroy the fragile yet full flavors of the vegetables, he says. Instead, he semi-cooks them over low heat with a tiny amount of oil or vegetable stock and saves the cooking juices to make a sauce.

A medley of raw and barely cooked vegetables becomes the evening's "vegetables with potato dumplings and burrata," where more than a dozen assorted vegetables sporting a carefully orchestrated, tousled look, cover three tiny dumplings. Other vegetables are cooked slowly and then pureed into a sauce.

The garden regimen also means Manresa's sommelier, Jeff Bareilles, has to look for an array of lighter wines. "I have three wine lists -- one by-the-glass, one by-the-bottle, and a third that I use to pair with the spontaneous dishes from the garden," he says.

Kinch's mellow moments at the farm are when his culinary ideas spring to life -- "90 percent of them," he says.

Being intimately connected to a farm, and especially one that is tuned to the forces recognized in biodynamic farming, may be the new-old road that chefs are rediscovering.

What is biodynamic farming?

A biodynamic farm by its nature is organic, although it might not necessarily be certified as organic.

Farms can be certified biodynamic by Demeter International, the European biodynamic certification organization.

Biodynamics follows precise methods and techniques enunciated by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in a series of speeches he gave in 1924.

Biodynamic farming involves the rituals, practices and formulas based on his study of nature and the cosmos -- for example, the making and applying of certain preparations by the lunar, solar and astrological calendars.

Two of the preparations, 501 and 500, involve stirring quartz and manure respectively into water in a way that creates a vortex in the water, reversing direction intermittently throughout one hour. The mixture is highly dilute, and often described as "homeopathic" in dosage.

Some other formulas include those injected into compost. One consists of dried chamomile flowers stuffed into intestines (natural sausage casings) and buried underground for six months. A yarrow compost preparation consists of dried yarrow blossoms stuffed into the bladder of a deer, hung from a tree for six months then buried underground for another six months. Oak bark preparation, also used in compost, must be placed in the skull of a domesticated horned animal and buried for six months before it is used.

The unlikely combination of tomatoes with strawberries from David Kinch of Manresa makes a stunning summer salad.

INGREDIENTS:

1 teaspoon maple syrup

3 drops of vanilla extract

3 teaspoons balsamic vinegar from Modena

5 teaspoons highest-quality extra virgin olive oil

Sea salt and pepper to taste

1/2 pint strawberries, hulled and cut in half (or quarters if large)

1/2 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

4 basil leaves, cut into fine strips

Several small whole mint leaves, for garnish

INSTRUCTIONS:

Instructions: Make the dressing by combining the maple syrup, vanilla and balsamic vinegar together and vigorously whisking in the olive oil. Season with salt and pepper.

Combine the strawberries, tomatoes and thinly cut basil. Season with the dressing and a turn from a pepper mill and toss them as gently as possible so as not to bruise the strawberries or crush the cherry tomato halves.

Serve in a bowl and decorate with the whole mint leaves arranged around the top.

Chef David Kinch of Manresa says, "This recipe will not work and will not be worth doing unless the peas are as naturally sweet as possible" -- ideally when just harvested. Kinch likes it with grilled calamari. It's also good with crudites and grilled fish, and may be stirred into a vegetable bouillon for a soup. Young ginger is a pale cream color with very thin skin. It is available at most Asian supermarkets and fine food stores.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup of very sweet, fresh shelled peas

About 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, preferably Catalan

1 tablespoon finely chopped toasted Marcona almonds

Grated zest of one lemon

1 tablespoon grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Fine sea salt to taste

About 1 teaspoon lime juice

About 1 teaspoon young ginger, freshly grated

INSTRUCTIONS:

Instructions: Place 3/4 cup of shelled peas with the olive oil in a blender and puree until completely smooth. You might need to add a touch more oil to get a pourable consistency. Add the rest of the peas and pulse a few more times so you have a bit of pea texture. Season with the almonds, lemon zest, cheese, salt, lime juice and young ginger to taste.

If foraging for wild nasturtiums, make sure you're picking from a place that is not sprayed with chemicals or that is too close to traffic. If you're serving the risotto as a main dish, you may want to sprinkle it with toasted pine nuts or almonds. Use the leftover nasturtium stock in soups and dressings.

INGREDIENTS:

Nasturtium stock

2 large bunches of nasturtium flowers on long stems

Additional flowers to make one packed cup

2 cups still mineral water

2 tablespoons softened unsalted butter

1 tablespoon of lemon juice

Sea salt to taste

Risotto

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons minced white onion

1 cup carnaroli or arborio rice

1/4 cup white wine

1 1/2 cups Manresa Vegetable Stock, at low simmer

(see recipe)

About 1/3 cup nasturtium stock

5 to 6 tablespoons grated Parmesan

Sea salt to taste

Nasturtium buds, for garnish (optional)

Young nasturtium leaves (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS:

For the nasturtium stock: The day before, separate flowers, tender young leaves and stems. Save the unopened buds for garnish on the finished rice.

Make sure you have at least one cup of the picked nasturtium flowers. Cover the nasturtium stems with mineral water, cover with plastic wrap and allow to infuse in the refrigerator for 24 hours. The next day, strain and discard the stems. Save the nasturtium water.

Slowly heat about 3/4 cup of the nasturtium water until warm, around 120°. Do not overheat.

Pour water into a blender and add the flowers and the butter. Blend the flowers until you have a smooth sauce. Strain and season with lemon juice and salt. Set aside. Makes about 1 cup.

For the risotto: In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt butter and add onion. Cook until onions have softened. Add rice and stir until it begins to clump slightly. Add wine and stir in. When wine is absorbed, add prepared vegetable stock by the 1/2 cupful, stirring after each addition. When the stock is almost absorbed, add additional stock (about 1 1/2 cups total). Add the prepared nasturtium stock. When the rice is finished, stir in cheese, add desired salt and spoon onto the plate. When serving as a main dish, top with toasted almonds and/or pine nuts. Garnish with the buds of nasturtium along with any other flowers and tender leaves.

Allow the stock to rest after cooking, and refrigerate with the vegetables in the liquid to give the stock more body, says chef David Kinch.

INGREDIENTS:

6 medium carrots, peeled and quartered

1 onion, peeled and quartered

2 shallots, peeled and left whole

2 leeks, trimmed and cleaned

Several sprigs of fennel tops

1 bay leaf

Sprigs of thyme and parsley

2 whole star anise

1 tablespoon sugar

2 cloves garlic, peeled and left whole

1 cup white wine

3 quarts of water

INSTRUCTIONS:

Instructions: Combine all ingredients in a large stockpot. Bring to a low simmer over medium heat for 25 minutes. Turn off the heat and let sit, covered, for 4 hours. Store in the refrigerator, and strain only as needed, just before using.